


Veronica Mars: The In-Between Years

by TunnelRabbit



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, In-between Canon, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Veronica's missing narration, Voiceover - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24500317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TunnelRabbit/pseuds/TunnelRabbit
Summary: "After my dad lost the race for Balboa County sheriff—when I lost him the race—I transferred to Stanford. How did I secure myself admission over the summer, after all the deadlines had passed? Do you really need to ask? These days, I’d use the term 'leverage.' Stanford University, my lifelong dream. Towering palms, stately colonnades, the sandstone and tile. I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity, and I wasn’t going to look back, however tarnished my arrival...."What Veronica was up to in those years after Hearst, before the Neptune High reunion, in her own voiceover.
Relationships: Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie & Veronica Mars, Keith Mars & Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars, Veronica Mars & Eli "Weevil" Navarro, Veronica Mars/Stosh "Piz" Piznarski, Wallace Fennel & Veronica Mars
Comments: 9
Kudos: 16





	Veronica Mars: The In-Between Years

**Author's Note:**

> Begins the summer after the Season 3 finale, ends where the Veronica Mars movie begins. Basically canon-compliant, a few things tweaked or fudged.

After my dad lost the race for Balboa County sheriff—when I lost him the race—I transferred to Stanford. How did I secure myself admission over the summer, after all the deadlines had passed? Do you really need to ask? These days, I’d use the term “leverage.”

Stanford University, my lifelong dream. Towering palms, stately colonnades, the sandstone and tile. California’s citadel of learning and privilege, Silicon Valley’s brain trust. I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity, and I wasn’t going to look back, however tarnished my arrival, abandoning Dad in Neptune to deal with the fallout from my indiscretions. To be fair, he pushed me out the door and all but changed the locks. He wanted this even more than I did.

Dad made me vow to focus exclusively on academics, and for the first time, I actually followed his good advice and kept my nose out of other people’s business. Partly because the work was genuinely challenging—tougher standards than any I’d encountered before, other than my own—and actually required my full attention. Partly because I stayed on campus as much as possible (they don’t call it the ivory tower for nothing, surrounded by a vast moat of verdant, well-watered lawns). Partly because I willfully closed my eyes to the insane inequities and gentrification fuckery of Palo Alto vs. East Palo Alto—a have/have not divide that made Neptune look like a garden of inter-class harmony. I kept telling myself (over and over) that no action I could take in my short years there would even leave a dent. I had nothing to learn off-campus except how hard the world sucked, and I already knew that.

Keep your hands to yourself, Veronica, eyes on your own work, and no one will get hurt. 

I didn’t date anyone. Hook-ups, sure. A girl’s got her needs, and plenty of Stanford men could pony up. But I knew better than to get emotionally involved with any more needy, over-privileged fuck-ups. (At Stanford, of course, most of them weren’t fuck-ups—they were angling to become the Jake Kanes of our generation, and therefore even less appealing for the long term.)

I ended up majoring in Sociology and minoring in Psych. It was dry, but I wanted dry. A distant, objective analysis of the human condition.

And then, clutching my diploma, I got the hell out of California.

I loved New York. Just as corrupt and dirty, without California’s deceptively sunny glamour. It _looks_ corrupt and dirty, and I appreciated the honesty. Dense, intense, and in-your-face; people don’t avoid each other—they can’t—so everything’s a confrontation. I found it refreshing.

But I wasn’t there just for the gritty ambience. Columbia Law was as challenging as Stanford, but by the nature of the degree program and the city, I had to get tangled up with people again. This time, I had the rituals of my new profession to keep me in line. Law is, after all, the study and of rules, and if you can’t follow them, if you think laws apply to some but not to others, you’re really not in the right line of work, are you? (Make a note. We’ll come back to this.)

Columbia University was just as much a bastion of the elite as Stanford, but has to rub elbows with the unlettered a little more. It’s in Harlem, after all—doing its best to screen out the unsavory elements of the real world with walls of brick, hired muscle, and digital technology, all while professing to teach us how to survive in it. I’d already learned those lessons and spent my off-hours exploring the rapidly gentrifying blocks of America’s greatest black neighborhood and hunkering down with my law books in my favorite pupusa place just over the line in Spanish Harlem—which was decidedly not gentrifying. (Yet.)

Not that I lived in either neighborhood, myself. I wasn’t the kind of grad student who could afford Manhattan. I rented a tiny studio apartment in Queens for $1200 a month with the LIR trains thundering overhead, vibrating my bed every night. A girl’s gotta get her kicks somehow, I suppose. I certainly wasn’t getting them any other way, at least not at first.

Ok, I make it sound like I played it totally safe all those years, staying in my own lane, patiently focused on my torts and remedies like good little law student. I might be glossing over a few things—there are other stories I could tell. But let’s not lose the thread here. New York isn't the end game here, though I didn't know it at the time.

Law school only lasts three years. And then you’ve got to make a couple of choices: what state to take the bar exam in, and how, exactly, you’re going to wield that shiny, new J.D.

Go back to Neptune? Back to Dad? Back to that sunny, sandy, sordid mess? Or take a gig here in the Big Apple, maybe moonlight in the back alleys of Gotham, bringing my noir fantasies to life?

* * *

I missed Dad so much it hurt sometimes. He came out to see me as often as he could, but without an energetic young assistant around to take up the slack, the caseload kept him pretty busy. Which was a good thing, of course. And he was courting a lady friend, so he wasn’t exactly alone.

Thing was, Dad wasn’t the only one back in Neptune. Logan, who I kept out of my brain as much as I could, was still kind of there. Logan, whose weakness for the sweet taste of revenge was even more destructive than mine—but then the target for his vengeance was so often himself. He understood this, on some level: "In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior. Francis Bacon"—that was his voicemail greeting he recorded in the summer of 2006, in a blue funk of penitence. "Gorgeous hair is the best revenge" replaced it a week later "—Ivanka Trump." It’s not like he didn’t try to move on—he was moving constantly: Monaco, Amsterdam, Phuket—international party scene of the month. He sought me out in Manhattan, tried to get him to party with him. I humored him, once and only once. But for whatever reason, Logan still kept the Neptune Grand as his home base, constantly returning to the scene of the crimes. And I suppose signing an actual a lease would be too much commitment. He did have some excuse of a job, but mostly he just burned through his inheritance on a drug-and-sex-fueled pyre. 

Was that lost boy still in there? The tender, damaged romantic that maybe only Lilly and I had truly known, and only me left alive to remember? Well, whatever faith I might have in that little kernel of a soul persisting under extended drought conditions, there was no way I was going to be publicly associated with Logan Echolls ever again. We lost touch and I didn’t find out about the two ODs and the suicidal fantasies until much later.

Mac was putting in her time in Silicon Valley and suggested I pay off my loans working for some tech firm’s legal counsel. Nope. Been there, not doing that.

Wallace was giving Chicago another try, and seemed to love it almost as much as I loved NYC. So maybe that was an option. But he had a new relationship brewing, a serious one, and I didn’t want to get in the way of it. I wanted him to have the good life he deserved—wife and two kids and a picket fence. Or a brownstone walkup, whatever. If anyone had earned the right to hope for something better, it was Wallace. Not that I was ever a competitor in his love life, obviously, but I don’t exactly fade into the woodwork when I’m around. At minimum, I’m distracting. And holding back to the minimum is not my M.O.

It’s not often I quote the words of Dick Casablancas, but I was kryptonite, and not only to rich boys. Wallace got off relatively easy, with a few close scrapes. But he knows better than anyone: care too much about Veronica Mars and she’ll bring you down.

Case in point: Weevil.

Technically, he’d sent himself back inside. His abuela lived long enough to see him get out of prison for accessory to the assault and battery that led to Thumper’s death, finally collect his high school diploma, and start living the good life as a college janitor. She wouldn’t have seen her grandson happy, but at least she would have seen him going straight on parole. Last time I saw him was at her funeral, just before I left Neptune for Stanford. He’d always been a master of masks, always in control of who saw which Eli (I sometimes wondered what exactly had forced him to hide so much, so young), but on that day, his face was carved from stone. Surrounded by family and friends, who touched him as they passed, on the shoulder or the back, with tearfully murmured words of condolence or prayer, he was unmoved, unbreakable. Like he was holding everybody off—and himself together—by force of will.

I spent a few awkward minutes at the reception at their house, recognized a few familiar faces: only a couple of the PCHers; Carmen, back from UCLA from the summer; Corny, which surprised me. Chardo. Mac might have come with me, but she and Bronson were doing summer internships in Seattle. So I came solo and made my excuses early.

Weevil caught my arm outside just as I was heading out the gate. Didn’t say anything, just pulled me into his arms and held me so tightly I thought I might snap. So tightly that for a moment there, I never wanted him to let go. His chin over my shoulder and his mouth near my ear, he didn’t need much more than a husky whisper—the kind that holds back tears—to say, “Goodbye, Veronica. Give ‘em hell.”

“What else would I do?” I answered, for lack of a better quip, a little thrown.

He pulled back, gripped me by the shoulders, and fixed me with a glare, those Maybelline lashes shading his eyes so I couldn’t read them, and delivered an order: “Don’t come back here.”

It wasn’t till I was down the street, in my car, pulling on my seatbelt that I realized the hair behind my ear was damp.

But I digress. The point is, the spring after his grandmother passed, Mac told me he’d been arrested for running a fake ID operation out of the maintenance basement at Hearst. Less than three months off of parole, he was charged with fraud, and, because of his prior, sentenced to 3 to 5 in Chino. Yes, it was his own choices that put him there. But _I_ had put him at risk of parole violation the year before that, repeatedly, just because I needed him—it’s not like I didn’t know there were consequences. I was the one who’d pointed him to the machine, who’d given him the detes on how the scam went down, a few days after that Aspen ski gang confessed and cleared him. I let him lie to me. Maybe I owed him, maybe he owed me, but in the end, he was the one who paid.

* * *

The truth was, New York had gotten into my blood—the city itself. I could plug myself into it like a super-charged engine and hum for days on the concentrated ambition. I had friends there, and I cared about them, but I wasn’t tangled up in the lives they went home to after work. And they only knew the Veronica of today: plucky blonde, whipsmart and moving up.

But I hadn't sold out. I still fought for justice, still wanted to take down the Man. Maybe now, I thought, with the right tools, I could work within the system, hoping that fight would align with the law I now swore to defend, and its checks and balances would also check my vigilante temptations. Spoiler: it didn’t.

I had done a clinic in defense appeals during law school and a summer internship with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Out of that, a job came through doing the former with the latter and I took it. I worked my ass off there, filing paperwork with a warrior’s zeal. It turns out that not that much criminal defense takes place in the courtroom. Most of it’s phone calls, depositions, and deals. I only got to stand before a jury twice.

So, predictably, I suppose, I got bored. Before long I had my nose in all kinds of places it didn’t belong, deeper into the individual cases than I had any authority to go. And when I discovered that we were prosecuting the wrong guy and did something about it, and then did it again on another case, and then there was that whole Abacus Bank affair (which wasn’t even in my department but I never can leave well enough alone, whenever the underdog’s taking the fall for the big guns), and then I was being summoned by the DA himself for a firm talking-to and the threat of a disciplinary review, or worse. I managed not to get fired, or have anything on my record—I had more than enough on everybody by then to leverage an opportunity to resign. But I agreed with them that it was time to move on.

In the end, I might have helped a few people wring a trickle of retribution from the system, but mostly I’d simply played my part to keep the wheels turning, justice and injustice tumbling out of the courts like balls from a lottery machine.

I knew this guy Rob, a Wall Street venture capitalist—a scrappy underdog like me, ruthless, conniving, and loyal to the ones who count, with dreamy Mediterranean eyes. Knew him in the biblical sense, I mean. And moved in with him, but that was as much a Manhattan rent strategy as anything else. He may not have been the love of my life, but he was electric under the sheets, and he was the kind of person I understood. Or so I thought, until I found out he’d opened credit accounts in my name to finance his ex-girlfriend’s drug habit. I suppose I did understand, on one level, the hold those old bonds can have on you, but that only made it a cleaner break for me. New York City Veronica was a no-bullshit Veronica. With the lease and the credit entanglements, it took longer than I wanted to fully cut ties, but one good cry in the shower and I shut off my feelings for Rob like a faucet. Don’t ever say you can’t live and learn.

Through Rob and his connections, I’d started getting interviews with corporate firms, even before leaving the D.A.’s office, that’s where I headed next. If vigilante justice only got people hurt and the system inevitably served its masters, where was the harm in just building up a nest egg for myself, for once? (Which was Mac’s argument all along.) And I can’t deny that the prospect of unlimited resources at my fingertips to pursue a case got me salivating. Maybe I was selling out, but would it really make any difference in the big picture?

After all, I was just one girl in a world of leeches.

Wouldn’t you know, this was when Piz came back into my life, a chance meeting at a young professionals meet-up in Greenwich Village—the sweetest guy who’d ever had the misfortune of dating me. He didn’t seem to have learned anything when it came to Veronica Mars, and considering that the gavel of my hard-earned better judgment was pounding for me to walk away, apparently I hadn’t either. Because I went on a date with him—just to catch up. And kissed him. And then another date. And ended up in bed with him. In my own defense, Piz _had_ upped his game, in both persuasiveness and pleasure. And I enjoyed being sincerely _wanted_. I enjoyed being sincere, period. He reminded me of the kind of person I once thought I was—a little bit of a marshmallow. 

Piz wasn’t actually from Neptune, he’d just gone to college there. He wasn’t grown in the same petri dish of corruption, I told myself, so getting involved with him wasn’t really a return to my roots. I could go forward with Piz.

Things were good with him for a while there. Really good. Good enough that I started to imagine that the life I was supposed to have might actually be attainable after all: Stanford, law degree, career, marriage (still wasn’t sure about the kids). Good enough that I agreed to meet his parents. I was really trying.

But being with him inevitably brought Wallace, Mac, Weevil back into my thoughts and, unfortunately for Piz, Logan Echolls.

So when Logan called out of the blue, ten years after we graduated from high school, an SOS from a ghost pinging through my iPhone, my subconscious had already cleared him to land.

A quick search on LinkedIn and Facebook (where I kept a dummy account not linked to anything in my real name—with my background, I’m very protective of my online privacy) revealed that he’d become a _Navy officer_ , and I nearly choked on my macchiato. How could a high-profile international playboy, with a record of drug and alcohol abuse, son of an acquitted murderer and rapist, a murder suspect twice-over himself—not to mention the lackluster high school and college GPAs, with disciplinary actions on record, and a piss-poor professional resume—possibly have met the _bare minimum qualifications_ to be a Navy officer, much less get commissioned? And why would he _want_ to? I fired up my dad’s PI logins for a deeper background check and started asking questions. Wouldn’t you?

Surprisingly—and by that, I mean astonishingly—24 hours of digging brought up nothing shadier than an endorsement from Representative Lee, attesting to Logan’s reformed ways (that is, bribery or blackmail behind the scenes, without a doubt—leveraged both on and by the Congressman). The ways themselves, by all appearances, had been genuinely reformed. A stint in SoCal’s most highly regarded rehab center, membership in some kind of “clean-living” outfit involving wilderness retreats on undoing patriarchy—detoxing mind, body, and masculinity—seemed to have done the job. On the other hand, he’d also been dating Carrie Bishop, a.k.a. indie femme fatale Bonnie Deville, for a couple of years, and that was a few yard lines short of wholesome.

And Bonnie, of course, was who he was accused of murdering.

“Veronica, I need your help….”

**Author's Note:**

> Likely to be continued.
> 
> I got it into my head to write this after Season 4, puzzling over Veronica's intense cynicism and where it had come from. This was really more of an attempt to explore that, but I had to start at the beginning--or rather, the end of the marshmallow years. Because her marshmallow center is hard to find later on.
> 
> I don't really have much time to write these days, though--this was mostly written in January--so who knows when I'll post again. When the schools reopen and I'm not working my job 10pm-1am...someday.....


End file.
